Rahm Emanuel's Big Giveaway

Rahm Emanuel, political genius and mayor of Chicago, has stepped into it up to his eyeballs. In the same week he's planning to shut down 54 schools and six mental-health centers, Emanuel has proposed to hand DePaul and its extraordinarily mediocre basketball program, $100 million in taxpayer money in order to build a new building in which they can be mediocre. My old friend Rick Telander took Rahm deep downtown on this preposterous misallocation of resources.

Not only is this wrong and unfair, it is nigh onto insane. Say DePaul plays 18 men's games in the new arena. That only leaves 357 days of emptiness. Sure, there would be some other games held there - I don't know, maybe dodgeball and mud wrestling - but this is such a guaranteed money-loser that it boggles this little scribe's rapidly balding head. Maintenance alone would bankrupt a small town. Plus, Chicago already has the United Center, which seats almost 22,000. It's a much better facility than DePaul's current Allstate Arena home court, which is 15 miles away in Rosemont. The United Center is much closer to DePaul than McCormick Place is. It does about 200 events a year, has a nice hockey rink and wooden hoops floor, clean washrooms, and it already offered itself to DePaul for 10 years, rent-free. No deal. DePaul likes this Emanuel idea more. And why shouldn't it? If you're at the trough, you're going to waddle over to the feeding spot with the most slop rolling down the flume. In Chicago, this is known as business as usual. Of course, everything's a game in Chicago, run by people who have power, people we don't interact with doing things - like giving away parking meters and a billion dollars - that we only become aware of when we catch up to the rusty can that has been kicked down the road and find out we've cut our feet badly and we're bleeding away. Or our taxes abruptly resemble shakedowns.

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Good on Telander for linking this giveaway to the disastrous privatization schemes pushed by Emanuel's predecessor, Richard M. Daley. Emanuel himself recently ripped Daley for his absurd scheme regarding the city's parking meters, irony being truly dead and cremated.

In announcing a settlement on contested fees for lost revenue on street closures, Emanuel said pointedly, "The company knows now that I'm a different type of mayor."